The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (icecream ebook reader TXT) 📕
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The Age of Reason is an important work in the American Deist movement. Paine worked on it continually for more than a decade, publishing it in three parts from 1794 through 1807. It quickly became a best-seller in post-Revolution America, spurring a revival in Deism as an alternative to the prevailing Christian influence.
In clear, simple, and often funny language, Paine attempts to dissect the Bible’s supposed inaccuracies and hypocrisies. He portrays the Bible as a human construct, full of illogic, errors, and internal inconsistencies, as opposed to it being a text born of divine inspiration. On those arguments he pivots to decrying not just Christianity, but organized religion as a whole, as a human invention created to terrorize and enslave. Instead of accepting organized religion, he states that “his mind is his own church” and that man must embrace reason.
While these arguments weren’t new to the wealthy and educated class of the era, they were new to the poor masses. The book was at first distributed as cheap unbound pamphlets, making it easily accessible to the poor; and Paine’s simple language was written in way the poor could understand and sympathize with. This made the powerful very nervous, and, fearing that the book could cause a potential revolution, Paine and his publishers were suppressed.
Paine wrote The Age of Reason while living in Paris. In France, its thesis wasn’t revolutionary enough for the bloodthirsty Jacobins; he was imprisoned there for ten months and only escaped execution through a stroke of luck. Meanwhile in Britain, the government considered the pamphlets seditious. British booksellers and publishers involved in printing and distributing the pamphlets were repeatedly tried for seditious and blasphemous libel, with some even receiving sentences of hard labor.
Paine began writing Part III after escaping France for America, but even the American elite thought the book too scandalous, with Thomas Jefferson—himself a Deist—advising Paine not to publish. Paine listened to Jefferson’s advice and held off publishing Part III for five years before publishing extracts as separate pamphlets. For that reason, Part III is not a concrete publication, but rather an arrangement of several loosely-related pamphlets organized at the discretion of an edition’s editor.
Once it was in the hands of Americans, it sparked a revival in Deism in the United States before being viciously attacked from all sides. Paine earned a reputation as an agitator and blasphemer that stuck to him for the rest of his life.
Despite The Age of Reason’s harsh reception—or perhaps, because of it, and the controversy and discussion it caused—it achieved a popularity in England, France, and America that gave it incredible influence in those nation’s perspectives on organized religion.
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- Author: Thomas Paine
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This is so evidently descriptive of a military chief, that it cannot be applied to Christ without outraging the character they pretend to give us of him. Besides which, the circumstances of the times here spoken of, and those of the times in which Christ is said to have lived, are in contradiction to each other. It was the Romans, and not the Assyrians, that had conquered and were in the land of Judea, and trod in their palaces when Christ was born, and when he died; and so far from his driving them out, it was they who signed the warrant for his execution, and he suffered under it.
Having thus shown that this is no prophecy of Jesus Christ, I pass on to the third passage quoted from the Old Testament by the New as a prophecy of him.
This, like the first I have spoken of, is introduced by a dream. Joseph dreameth another dream, and dreameth that he seeth another angel. The account begins at the 18th verse of the 2nd chapter of Matthew:—
“The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt; and was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
This passage is in the book of Hosea 11:1. The words are, “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images.”
This passage, falsely called a prophecy of Christ, refers to the children of Israel coming out of Egypt in the time of Pharaoh, and to the idolatry they committed afterwards. To make it apply to Jesus Christ, he, then, must be the person who “sacrificed unto Baalim and burnt incense to graven images”; for the person called out of Egypt by the collective name Israel, and the persons committing this idolatry, are the same persons, or the descendants of them. This, then, can be no prophecy of Jesus Christ unless they are willing to make an idolator of him. I pass on to the fourth passage called a prophecy, by the writer of the book of Matthew.
This is introduced by a story told by nobody but himself, and scarely believed by anybody, of the slaughter of all the children under two years old, by the command of Herod; a thing which it is not probable could be done by Herod, as he only held an office under the Roman Government, to which appeals could always be had, as we see in the case of Paul.
Matthew, however, having made or told this story, says, 2:17, “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, ‘In Ramah was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not.’ ”
This passage is in Jeremiah 31:15; and this verse, when separated from the verses before and after it, and which explains its application, might with equal propriety be applied to every case of wars, sieges, and other violences, such as the Christians themselves have often done to the Jews, where mothers have lamented the loss of their children. There is nothing in the verse taken singly that designates or points out any particular application of it, otherwise than it points to some circumstances which, at the time of writing it, had already happened, and not to a thing yet to happen, for the verse is in the preter or past tense. I go to explain the case, and show the application of the verse.
Jeremiah lived in the time that Nebuchadnezzar besieged, took, plundered, and destroyed Jerusalem, and led the Jews captive to Babylon. He carried his violence against the Jews to every extreme. He slew the sons of King Zedekiah before his face; he then put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and kept him in prison till the day of his death.
It is of this time of sorrow and suffering to the Jews that Jeremiah is speaking. Their temple was destroyed, their land desolated, their nation and government entirely broken up, and themselves, men, women, and children, carried into captivity. They had too many sorrows of their own, immediately before their eyes, to permit them, or any of their chiefs, to be employing themselves on things that might, or might not, happen in the world seven hundred years afterwards.
It is, as already observed, of this time of sorrow and suffering to the Jews that Jeremiah is speaking in the verse in question. In the two next verses, the 16th and 17th, he endeavors to console the sufferers by giving them hopes, and, according to the fashion of speaking in those days,
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